


Role of a Lifetime

by NienteZero



Category: Leverage
Genre: Vignette, season one, sophie's rich internal life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-24
Updated: 2017-03-24
Packaged: 2018-10-10 05:17:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10429968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NienteZero/pseuds/NienteZero
Summary: It's not commitment phobia if you really want that one statuette.





	

Nothing changes.

She plays the roles she’s always played. The soft, sweet women are the safest. Men will still protect her while she’s got one hand in their safe and the other one emptying their Swiss bank accounts. The hard women are more fun. Like Annie Kroy, all teeth and threats, all the things she doesn’t say when she’s being easy to like. But it's more dangerous, too, so she doesn’t bring the hard ones out to play too often. 

Nothing changes. Once Nate Ford almost stopped her, but he didn’t. She has the time and the money to do what she loves, but she can’t con herself into believing that she’s a good actress.

Then Nate Ford shows up in her life again, with a crew and a job. They make a ridiculous, never-have-to-work-again, amount of money. They right a wrong, and stop a bad guy. It’s something new. It’s an easy, cheap good feeling. Nate Ford’s always been the one who might make things interesting. So now she has a team.

Sophie Devereaux cares about this bunch of criminal misfits. She’s never lacked empathy, and caring about people feels nice, so she leans into the performance as Sophie takes them under her wing. She plays against Nate’s abrasive personality. She doesn’t find it a hardship to let these people open themselves up to her, trading the currency of small, unimportant bits of her own past for their disclosures. It isn’t that she’s setting out on a long con; Sophie’s tenderness toward these idiots stumbling toward doing good is more real than most jobs she’s played.

But like any job that runs too long, she has to put more parts of herself into Sophie, and the line between who she is and who Sophie Devereaux is gets messier. The attachments grow stronger than she intends.

Parker draws out a protectiveness she'd forgotten how to feel. Parker needs people who won’t abandon her; people who’ll treat her like a person, not a thing to be thrown away or used. Hardison’s obviously half in love with Parker already, and she feels a foolish fondness for shepherding their relationship along. Nate’s in and out of the bottle and needs her to smooth things along with the team. She shouldn’t care about the thing growing between them, but that frustrating, remarkable man is under her skin. And Eliot. Eliot will stand between them all and harm, will protect her even when she’s not playing the sweet, broken bird. Eliot has seen that she can be hard and will still stand in front of her.

So, like any job that runs too long, she feels an itch. It's dangerous to be attached. She finds a big haul that makes it worth risking everything, and she goes for it. She doesn’t stick the landing, doesn’t get the statue, definitely doesn't get to keep the team. But she does prove the point that nothing needs to change. She’s not Sophie Devereaux, she’s a woman who takes care of herself and takes what she wants.


End file.
